Cameron’s U-turn on the environment has the greens howling, but should delight
voters

For years, the countryside has had pitifully few friends in Westminster. The Labour Party had abandoned hope of winning votes there: its interest in rural England extended solely to imposing a fox-hunting ban. The Tory modernisers, meanwhile, took rural voters for granted, so felt able to pick fights over planning laws and ludicrously expensive railway lines. Both parties also allowed their environmental policy to be shaped by the prevailing fashion in London: so mainly concerns about carbon emissions and the welfare of newts, trees and bats. The millions who actually lived in the countryside were left out of the equation.

It was always odd that David Cameron should go along with such a process. He is, at heart, a rural Tory who loves country walks and has a labrador-like tendency to dive into icy lakes. He still grumbles to his wife about what, for him, are “banned activities” – notably shooting, which he feels does not befit a leader of a party trying to win suburban votes. But that compliance with the consensus was adopted when he thought he would win the next election. Now, he thinks he may not – which explains a quiet yet fundamental change in the political environment.

Owen Paterson is far from a household name, but the significance of his appointment as Environment Secretary has not been lost on the green lobby groups. As far as they’re concerned, this is war. They are already denouncing him as a “prominent hater of wind turbines” and overall climate change sceptic.

It is just as well, then, that Paterson has spent two years at Northern Ireland, learning the art of political combat. For his critics are quite right to detect a shift in policy. According to Downing Street, his mission is to revive the rural economy – and the main species he has been asked to protect is the humans trying to make ends meet. As for his leader, the man once photographed being pulled by dogs over a Norwegian glacier is tiptoeing away from his old policies as he might do from embarrassing photographs of his student exuberance.

What Cameron has realised, perhaps belatedly, is that the crash has changed everything. In the boom years, a green surcharge on a heating bill seemed like a small price to pay for environmental progress. But with living standards facing their worst squeeze for 80 years, and at least 20,000 pensioners dying of the cold each year, the cost of such green subsidies is now becoming intolerable. Especially since, as Paterson will know, their beneficiaries are often the rich – to an extent that even appals the gentry. “When we toffs meet up, all we talk about is government grants,” one landowner tells me. “I was even offered a grant for my folly. It’s all about who is getting what subsidy for which hydro plant.”

Over recent years, a class of landowning welfare junkies has been created – and the old environmental consensus left them immune from scrutiny. Many are impeccably connected (one has the Prime Minister as a son-in-law), and can take their money directly from Brussels. But there is still much an Environment Secretary can do to cut that cost.

Perhaps the greatest single opportunity facing him, however, is shale gas exploitation. Geologists have known for decades about gas trapped in shale and other rock formations, but only in the past 20 years has technology existed that allows it to be captured. In America, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, has transformed the energy supply. Shale now provides a third of its gas, up from 2 per cent a decade ago. British companies now pay four times as much for gas as their American counterparts – not something that global chemical companies can ignore when deciding where to build a new factory. Docks built to import gas into America are now exporting it.

This has been nothing short of an energy revolution, and it could well happen here. When 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas deposits were discovered in Lancashire last year – enough to power Britain for 65 years – it was without doubt the biggest energy find since North Sea oil in the Sixties. It says much about the hysterical nature of the British climate change debate, however, that this was almost entirely ignored.

Shale emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal, and is far cheaper to produce. The biggest deposits are in China, so passing fracking technology on to the Chinese could do more to reduce global carbon emissions than any airport runway ban. Yet the environmentalists have greeted shale with either complete silence, or outright hostility.

In economic terms, too, shale is a godsend for Cameron, just as North Sea oil was for Thatcher: it could well make Blackpool into the Dallas of the north, creating 5,000 jobs in an area that desperately needs them. But this gift horse is being sent packing, as if the Prime Minister wants to be left alone with his economic misery. Even as Northern Ireland Secretary, Paterson was saying in Cabinet that this was lunacy. Then, he was a lone voice. Now, he is in charge of the policy.

Part of the problem in developing shale is that the Environment Agency has inserted itself into the licensing process. It is taking between six and nine months to process drilling applications that should take a fortnight, at most. However, the quango answers to Paterson. He can not only nudge it along, but publish – and trumpet – the studies showing that fracking is both safe and viable. Early earth tremors, deep underground, have been judged to pose no safety risk.

Paterson’s will be a lonely battle, because shale lacks anything resembling a proper lobbying group to make its case. It is up against three powerful enemies: Big Oil, Big Green and Big Government. Indeed, had it not come along, Britain’s wind farm industry would have been in line for £130 billion in subsidy over the coming years. Little wonder that its allies are so angry, both at shale and at Mr Paterson’s appointment.

So how did he get the job? Until recently, Mr Cameron may not have felt able to make a move so certain to antagonise the evergreen Liberal Democrats. But Nick Clegg’s decision to go hostile over the summer, opposing the boundary review that Cameron wanted so badly, has allowed the Tories to be bolder. Indeed, while the reshuffle may have seemed boring if one only focused on the little-known names, it may yet be seen as the moment when the Prime Minister decided to bury bad ideas he had carried for far too long.

In the end, the biggest mistake you can make in politics is to judge a programme by its intentions, not its results. For more than a decade, environmental policy has been cursed with cross-party consensus because no one wanted to be seen to oppose so noble a cause. This left us a situation where aristocrats are offered subsidies for follies, and the Government was unmoved by what could be the best environmental news for a generation. Shale has helped America’s carbon emissions fall by 430 million tons in five years, more than any other country’s. This is progress that would, if we had a rational debate, be celebrated.

In sending Paterson to the environment department, Cameron may just open a new chapter in British environmental policy. And unlike the old one, it might yet leave Britain, and the world, a better and greener place.